Exploring happiness and its true causes

Everyone is looking for happiness in their life but not everyone's happiness is triggered by the same thing. Are you happier if you have a religion? Or fame? Or money?
At the Happiness and Its Causes conference in Brisbane the wealthy, the religious, and the famous share their experiences about the search for happiness.

The annual Happiness and Its Causes conference explores the amazing science and psychology of human happiness with the world's leading thinkers.

We were there to ask the wealthy, the religious, and the famous guest speakers to share their experiences about the search for happiness.

612 ABC Brisbane Mornings pulled together a panel of people who from the outside appear to have gained the things other's strive for in the pursuit of happiness.

Madonna King poses the question 'are you happy?' to a religious leader, Queensland's sixth richest person, a nationally famous comedian and a man who gave away his life's possessions.

The Panel includes:

The Archbishop of Brisbane and Head of the Anglican Church of Australia, Phillip Aspinall, Maha Sinnathamby, Queensland's sixth richest person with a net worth of $77 million, Meshel Laurie, a breakfast radio host, and comedian who tours the country, and Dennis Stevenson, a small business consultant who opened the doors to his Hamilton home and gave all of his 'stuff' away.

Learning happiness through loss

Dan Daly was a fireman of 24 years in New York when 9/11 happened.

The retired Battalion Chief of the New York City Fire department was at ground zero as the World Trade Centre buildings came down - as he watched many of his colleagues and friends suffer and die, while others helped strangers live.

Chief Daly now takes all he has learned from that experience to promote hope and tolerance.

He says sometimes tragic events cause people to come together.

"Take the cyclone and floods you've had here in Australia, you take 9/11 - a lot of these great tragedies cause us to come together and forget about our ego, we operate out of compassion, and when we operate out of compassion we take that road towards happiness."

He says going through an experience as traumatic as the terrorist attacks makes you stop and think about the tentativeness of life.

"We wanted to spend more time with the loved ones, and to tell them how much we loved them.

"In New York City you couldn't even hear a horn blowing I remember for months and months, people were opening the door for one another," he says.

"The legacy of 9/11 became 'look what we can do when we work together'."

Chief Daly says the volunteer effort that Brisbane saw after the floods needs to be harnessed on an ongoing basis.

He believes that individual acts of kindness could be the key to one's own happiness.

"What I do everyday, when I get out of bed and put my feet on the ground, take thirty seconds just to appreciate your life, and tell yourself that you're going to focus on the positive things in your life and do at least a few acts of service to other people during your day."

Exploring happiness through human stories

Often happiness is described as being contagious, so if you see someone else smiling - whether it's a stranger or a friend - do you feel compelled to ask "what's making you so happy?"

Roko Belic is a film director who's most recent film, 'Happy' combines powerful human stories from around the world with cutting edge science to give us a deeper understanding of our most valued emotion.

Roko says the last five years of his life has been consumed by producing the documentary that examines happiness, and it's true causes.

"Happiness is something you can talk about and think about and it can be in your head or you can feel it in your body. As a film maker I didn't want to make a film that was just about ideas about people talking so I went around the world to fourteen countries to find people's lives who illustrate some of these findings.

Roko says he was stunned to discover one of the subjects of the film, who lived in a slum in India's poorest city working over 12 hours a day was as happy as the average American.

He says a cultures values will determine how happiness is experienced by individuals and communities.